Hacker News Reader

A great use case for llms. I'm not expecting you to do this, but I would love to choose my own news sites. I'm a Brit living in Czech Republic. So I'd maybe have the guardian, BBC, and some Czech sources in there. Not so interested in American news, any American news that affects me will reach my local sources. But great work!

Thank you!

Adding filter for news sources should be pretty easy, I'll consider it for "advanced view".

A prompt, or more like a list of them seems the most interesting customization. For example: "no crypto currency", "nothing from Keith Rupert Murdoch", "chinese realestate", "ukraine war", "forex" etc

Now that would be worth something...

Say, you want more than 6 filters they costs 50 cents/filter/month with a minimum of 5.

I think one would gradually make more and more of them?

Agree. US news are not so relevant here so source customisation would be great!

Some changes that I would find useful are:

* Make it easier to browse back in time. My biggest annoyance with news sites I've subscribed to is that they have no way to find articles after they have moved off the front page so I feel compelled to visit every day, and when I don't I feel like I'm wasting money, so I unsubscribe. I did eventually find that you have previous days available in the newsletter section, but a more discoverable interface like "previous/next day" link on the bottom of the page would be great.

* Add some less frequent newsletters, such as weekly and monthly which dedupe any stories that come up multiple times in that period, and include the top N stories, rather than everything over a threshold.

* Sections would be great for advanced users. My ideal would be to let the user set a different threshold for each section, but then still display them all together on the front page.

Great idea and well executed - well done!

I actually created a site - https://detoxed.news - with a very similar philosophy a while back, though with a much simpler implementation. It periodically scrapes Wikipedia's Current Events Portal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events) and presents that information in a nicer format.

I think there's definitely a sweet spot where you keep well-informed about current events and happenings in the world, without wasting your time on the 24 hours new cycle.

The problem with using Wikipedia as a news source is that it focuses on really flashy topics, like murder and armed conflicts. Looking at the headlines of detoxed.news confirms this:

1) Flood in Rwanda kills 109 people 2) Sudan War 3) Australia evacuation from Sudan 4) Seizing of an oil tanker

None of these headlines keep me particularly informed and are actually a more potent version of the 24 hours new cycle

This is an awesome idea and I'm kicking myself for not thinking about it before. Very creative.

Have you made any attempt at quantifying its biases? Both whether it considers left- or right-leaning articles more significant and where it focuses most of its reporting. (Economy and the US from a first glance?)

Thank you!

> Have you made any attempt at quantifying its biases?

I haven't. I can share ChatGPT's evaluation of sources credibility, maybe that will give people some insights. For example, Reuters got 9.5 (out of 10), Lifehacker 7, Oprah Mag 3.

> where it focuses most of its reporting. (Economy and the US from a first glance?)

I'd say today is just US and economy-heavy day. There were many days when other categories and geographies made the top (I especially enjoy these). One example: https://newsletter.newsminimalist.com/p/tuesday-april-25-3-m...

> Have you made any attempt at quantifying its biases? Both whether it considers left- or right-leaning articles

FWIW, when I read news I often cross check on different outlets to get a sense of the span, range and sometimes media blackouts, including the ones with extreme bias (like RT reporting on Ukraine). This can give a good reading of the meta-temperature of a developing or controversial situation with a lot of propaganda and bias. In some cases, less trustworthy outlets will cover stories that aren’t narrative-friendly to more reputable publications, and sometimes, those can be really important.

For a service like this, I’d much prefer something analogous to “here’s what different outlets are saying”, rather than trying to make its own judgment about bias.

Great idea, the “here’s what different outlets are saying” feature. Stories that aren’t narrative-friendly to main stream media. Media blackouts to highlight propaganda and bias. Make it easy for reader to see the "manufactured consent"!

Subscribed to newsletter.newsminimalist.

In case you’re not already familiar with it, there’s a site called https://www.allsides.com/ that does exactly this. I believe the creator is on HN.

The absolute best feature is selecting the LEAST significant articles. Way more whimsey! +1

“Brief downpour in Karachi turns weather pleasant.”

I get the most random articles by selecting around the mode (peak) of the distribution. The lowest of the low is all Daily Mail gossip all the time :puke:.

Overall: love the idea.

Any chance of updating the RSS feed item "summary" to something more useful than "significant news" and title to something more than the date? Or maybe an RSS feed of the newsletter format?

(I do see some of the older items have titles that include some info on what's included)

Basically, I think the ideal RSS feeds would be _two_: 1. RSS feed of every item that hits the 6/10 threshold (title and link to original, summary not too important, either same as title or paragraph summary of what the article is about) 2. RSS feed of the newsletter (title: "May 4 2023 - significant news", link: newsletter page, summary: list of article titles)

I suppose versions of #1 with diff thresholds could be nice, but I'd probably only use the default threshold.

Background: I run a bot that sends RSS feeds into discord channels (easily followable to any discord server) and this particular feed seems potentially quite handy for good news info. Probably overlaps with https://whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com/ but that automation probably means it can catch breaking news faster than a manually-curated site like that.

Thanks for the feedback. All great points.

"RSS" that I have currently is generated by the email platform that I use for daily emails. It's not a proper RSS from website.

Making a proper RSS for website items is on my list, but I need to finish some other features first.

Agree about subtitles in older items, I guess I just got lazy writing them :) your message was just what I needed to get back to older better format.

Love this concept and signed up immediately.

Heads up that your plaintext emails in the newsletter have some html formatting and template artifacts in there.

Thanks, will look into that. I've been using the default template, which is relatively style-heavy, but will work on making it more minimal and clear.

Great idea!

Personally, I want an even higher signal to noise ratio and even fewer articles. Perhaps significance > 7, and articles from the last week.

Someone suggested making weekly section, I'll try to add it soon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35797568

This is great!

I've subscribed to the RSS feed. I thought the feed would provide links the significant news articles directly, but it appears to provide a link to the newsminimalist.com summary. That's totally fine, but I'd think it'd be a bit nicer if there was an option to access the articles directly.

I'm also using ChatGPT to scrape online info and reduce it. Were there any particularly interesting problems that you had to solve? For me, it was figuring out ways to reduce the number of tokens so I don't hemorrhage money!

Thanks!

Yeah RSS it not great currently. Replied about it here with more info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35820032

Oh, exactly the same problem. The straightforward implementation would make me broke in month :)

Had to make several optimizations to make the bill reasonable. Not all of them worked, some greatly reduced the quality of significance estimations.

Reducing number of tokens was super fun, forgot about it :D

I really love this. Thank you.

Question: are you using ChatGPT to summarize the article and making that the title of each post?

Yes! I do exactly that. In the early version I posted the original titles, but many were too clickbait-y and hard to read. I find the rewritten titles much easier to scan through.

How do you decide how aggressively to summarize? That is, a 200-word summary of an 800-word article is very different from a 200-word summary of a 5,000-word article.

Relatedly, it would be neat if you had a slider or +/- buttons for each article summary, so someone could choose their depth based on how interesting the title sounds.

I don't decide it.

I just ask chatgpt to "summarize the article very concisely" and hope that it won't lose any important points. But chatgpt is really good at summarizing, so I don't worry much.

Having +/- buttons is a good idea, will add it to todo list as well.

I assumed you did one llm batch a day and served it to all users. With +- buttons wouldn't you need to re-engage the llm?

Could just ask the model for 5 lengths/levels of detail per article and have the +/- switch between them.

This is what I was thinking, sort of like the mechanism that Newsela and others use for their leveled reading platforms.

If you were so inclined, it would probably be pretty trivial to also offer leveled versions as well, which would be very useful for schools/teachers to use with students. There are a handful of companies that have bespoke leveled reading articles created from standard news articles. ChatGPT would make the workflow for creating news articles much easier, though manual QC would still be necessary to ensure that the article summaries are accurate and appropriate for students.

Great work! I'd consider specifying the list of criteria for significance further, in order to counteract the heavy US bias of ChatGPT and, therefore, your site. I'm not a prompt engineer, but perhaps something on relevance for people from different countries, or simply adding to your prompt a sentence on ensuring geographical diversity.

The idea of filtering news sourced mentioned elsewhere is nice, but will necessitate considerable input from users, kind of negating the purpose of the site

Just published today's issue: https://newsletter.newsminimalist.com/p/wednesday-may-3-3-si...

I bet spam algorithms didn't like that I sent email to 30 people yesterday and 900 people today. Good problem to have :) Please check your spam folder if you don't see today's issue in inbox.

Hi and congrats, that's a great idea ? Is your project open source by any chance ? And if so, are you open to contributions ?

RSS: https://rss.beehiiv.com/feeds/4aF2pGVAEN.xml (some people had complaints about formatting there, will try to fix soon)

Amazing project. Would be cool if the RSS feed could accept a parameter for either top x stories, or all stories with score greater than y.

I am always interested in minimalist / text-oriented resources. And "importance ranking" seems like an especially valid task for AI. Thanks for sharing.

Every news site has some notion of top items, but you’ve done it 10x better. The de-duplication of similar stories, great summaries, and super clean interface are amazing. Bravo! It really feels like you solved news aggregation.

very good idea and good website, but very US focused. so not very useful. one thing that people tend to ignore about google and apple is how good their localization are. ofc i am not expecting the same sophistication from a team of 1, and i am not expecting anything at all. but i just want to encourage developers to think global from the get go.

True for today, many US-centric news made the cut. But that's not always the case. Here's recent issue with no US news: https://newsletter.newsminimalist.com/p/tuesday-april-25-3-m...

Some news entries appear to be of the "Top 5 things you should know today" variety, where it covers multiple topics. Example screenshot.[0] Might want to filter those out somehow?

[0] https://cln.sh/s44CS9tmwkC79NHcXPP3

These headlines are basically the same as I get going to Bloomberg.com/markets over the past couple of of days.

Yeah, today is very economy-heavy day. But in the past issues there were more articles about health, science and environment.

Recent example: https://newsletter.newsminimalist.com/p/tuesday-april-25-3-m...

I'm sure you're aware, but I don't see a comment - the site is down.

Wasn't aware, thank you. Can't find anything in logs, is it still down for you?

I’d love for there to be sections, such as science, business, politics, etc.

Similar aesthetic, different execution, but you could check out brutalist.report

I had them at one point, but decided to remove for simplicity. Will bring them back :)

Maybe make it optional because there’s huge value in keeping it simple like you currently have, so please don’t lose that

Eg default (no topic sections like what you have today), and optional advanced (with sections)

I think it's the best solution, will do it soon.

Also, is you’re looking for a simpler domain name - http://BigNews.today is available.

( I used ChatGPT to help me find it, via https://smartynames.com/ )

Seems like someone bought it and set up a redirect to newsminimalist.com

Thank you kind stranger!

Such a great idea! Good job!

I have a question: when watching shows like Last Week Tonight by John Oliver, it feels like the important news that make direct impact on people’s lives are more local than national or even international. The state changing a law here, the city building something new or make it harder to X..etc.,

Have you considered/thought about this aspect of news?

So cool! Would you be able to explain your architecture?

great work! How did you gain access to GPT-4 API? or are you manually inserting the article text into chat-gpt 4's web interface?

Thank you! I asked for GPT-4 access via form on OpenAI website, they gave me the one with 8k context window, which is enough for 99% of articles.